Bit of luck Joe didn't have a dog, then. You can fool some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't pull the wool over your dog's nose.

The Street (BBC1) by Jimmy McGovern, the first play in a new series, was a taut, twanging little thriller or, perhaps, a ghost story or, maybe, a murder mystery. One of those nessun dorma plays where no one drops off. Joe (David Thewlis) and Harry (also David Thewlis) are identical twins. As my DVD was an early cut, a good-enough-for-you-reviewers version, I could see how Joe and Harry were enabled to sit together on the sofa. Ah-ha! Joe is harrassed and hard up. Harry is confident and solvent. When they are watching football together at Harry's house, he chokes to death on a lemon sherbet and Joe assumes his strong personality, smart shirt and healthy bank account.

He now has the opportunity to see himself as others see him and speak his own eulogy at his own sparsely attended funeral. "Discount the priest and the organist and those two old biddies back there, there are 22 people here for Joe." His fellow workers didn't come. They didn't like him much. They didn't even dislike him enough to turn up and make sure he was safely shovelled under. He was not a striking personality.

There is a lot to be said for writing your own send-off. No one else appreciates your finer points as you do. I was once putting a final polish on Hannen Swaffer's obituary only to find him reading it over my shoulder. He felt it lacked colour, detail and, not to mince matters, length. So he dictated his own version. His total deafness, or a pretence of total deafness, made it impossible to argue. Swaffer is long forgotten, though not if he can help it.

Only Eddie, the street's taxi driver, was vaguely sorry Joe was dead. I was transfixed by the feelings rippling across Timothy Spall's face long before he refused the fare with his one and only line: "I won't tek it. I liked Joe." (Next week, The Street is Spall's story.)

Joe discovers a couple of things about Harry, too. He kept a pickled ear from the Falklands campaign in a cupboard, and he had a bit on the side, who arrived naked under a leopardskin coat to cheer him up. Hence the saying in these parts, "All fur coat and no knickers." As they also say in these parts, "By the lord, Harry!"

Who would be the first to recognise the risen Joe? Harry himself who, terrifyingly, lingered a little? Or would Joe betray himself with some unconscious mannerism? The first person to see through him was his mother. As Lennon and McCartney remarked, though she was born a long, long time ago, your mother should know. Next, in a firecracker performance from Bronagh Gallagher, was his wife, Mary. There is nothing more likely to annoy a wife than coming next. As her mother-in-law sat placidly on the couch licking her paws, Mary burst in like a Kilkenny cat and the air sizzled with crackles and spittle.

Then, just as Joe seems to be in the clear, Lieut Colombo turns at the door, saying, "Oh, one more thing ... " The coroner at Harry's inquest routinely plays Joe's second panic-stricken phone call to the ambulance service: "I gave the wrong address. Mine, not his."

It strikes me now that, if Joe had done nothing at all, he would probably have inherited Harry's money anyway. These things occur to you when McGovern lets go the grip on your throat.

A taxi driver, having locked the cab doors, once explained to me, all the way from Barking to the Isle of Dogs, how, to be a successful angler, you have to think like a fish. River Cottage: Gone Fishing (Channel 4) is just the stuff for taxi drivers. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who seemed to have fortified himself with cooking sherry as he babbled of fishy fact-finding forays and fun-filled fish frolics, was on a mission to take the heat off cod and introduce ugly, unfamiliar fish to the frying pan. The sea is full of ugly fish, who quite like being unpopular.

Fearnley-Whittingstall recommended pouting, a word that usually goes with "gorgeous". But not here. Or garfish, which, having green bones and being mostly nose, has been largely left in peace. Even he admitted it looked scary.

The garfish doesn't fool me. It is, essentially, a snoek. Dr Edith Summerskill, an old-style Labour minister, wasted a lot of breath in the dark days of peace trying to persuade Britain to eat snoek. It was, she said grimly, good for you. As the nation had already spent the war eating Spam, it felt it had suffered enough and set its face like stone against snoek. Dr Summerskill returned to the fight, claiming margarine was just as good as butter, but you could see the heart had gone out of her.